According to Snapchat, Memories is “a new way to save Snaps and Stories on Snapchat. It’s a personal collection of your favorite moments”.

Here’s what you need to know.

Your Personalized Album of Snaps

Snapchat Memories is a personalized album of your favorite Snaps and Stories that you access by swiping up on the camera home screen.

Previously, you could download your snaps and stories direct to your phone. Now, you can save them within the app itself for even easier access. This makes for a fun, more engaged way to share your memories with friends and family without scrolling through unsorted camera rolls, while keeping your “private” shots safe.

Everything you save to Snapchat Memories is securely backed up by Snapchat using Google’s reliable App Engine Cloud. This means that even if you lose your phone, you’ll still be able to access your saved snaps and stories next time you log in to the app.

Understanding the Memories Tab

When you open up Memories within Snapchat, you’ll see a reverse chronological list of your saved snaps and stories. Snaps are displayed as rectangles, and Stories as circles.

To search for specific Snaps and Stories, click on the Search button in the top-left. This search feature will not just look for words within your captions, but also recognizable objects (like cats or hats), as well as location (if you’ve allowed Snapchat to access your location).

The select button in the top right enables you to select one or more of your saved Snaps and Stories. You can then send these to friends, delete them, add them to your current Story, share on other platforms, or move to the “My Eyes Only” folder (more on this later).

Saving Your Snaps and Stories to Memories

Just before you send a snap to a friend or publish it to your Story, click on the download button at the bottom of the screen. This will save that snap to your Memories. Alternatively, if you long-hold the download button, you can also choose to “save to Camera Roll and Memories”.

If you want to save your currently viewable Snapchat Story (My Story) to Memories, navigate to the Stories screen. Click the download button that’s next to “My Story”. This will save the entire Story to your Memories.

Naturally, you can only save your own Snaps and Stories to Memories, not anyone else’s.

Posting Old Snaps and Stories

One of the main benefits of Memories is the ability to re-share your old Snaps and Stories. This is perfect for some #TBT posts. These can either be added to your current Story, or sent individually to friends.

Note that all old Stories and Snaps that you share will have a black border around them, and a timestamp, to make it clear how old they are.

To re-share a saved Snap, long-hold the Snap from within Memories, then edit as you normally would. Click the blue share button and choose to either add the Snap to your Story, or select the friends you want to send it to.

To re-share a saved Story, long-hold that Story, and make any edits. Click Send Story, and choose where you would like the story to be sent. You also have the option of only sending individual snaps from within your Stories.

Create New Stories From Your Memories

If you’ve created loads of snaps and taken loads of photos during your holiday and saved these to Memories, you can easily compile these into a brand new story.

To do this, click the Select button at the top right, and choose each of the Snaps, Stories, and photos from your Camera Roll, which you want to compile. Then click the circular + button at the bottom of the screen. A new Story will be created.

To name your new Story, long-hold the Story, click the hamburger button (top left), and click “Rename Story“.

You can then share this story as explained earlier.

Understanding “My Eyes Only”

How many times have you allowed a friend to browse through your Camera Roll, only to realize there’s a photo there you just didn’t want them to see?

That’s what “My Eyes Only” is for. This is a private album that you can add your private Snaps and Stories to.

Click the Select button within Memories, then choose one or more Snaps and Stories to make private. When you’re done, click on the padlock button at the bottom of the screen, and click “Move”. The first time you do this, you’ll be asked to provide a 4-digit passcode. Make sure you choose something you’ll remember. If you forget this, Snapchat can’t help you recover those Memories.

Why Memories is a Game-Changer

There are two main reasons why Memories is a very smart move by Snapchat.

But more importantly, Snapchat is helping to revolutionize the way we store, share, and look back on our memories. Up to now, social media has offered us a way to create semi-public albums of photos, and streams of status updates.

Snapchat is instead offering a searchable archive of Stories that we’ve lived through. Each of these stories now comprises filters, stickers, captions, images, and short-form video. If images paint a thousand words, Snapchat Stories could easily paint a million.

This offers a whole new experience when we’re looking back at old memories, or showing them to our friends and family.

I really don't like this memories thing. In the camera roll it uploadef ALL my pics from my phone and those are extremely private and I do not want them on there!!! Can other people see your camera roll? Please tell me how to completely deactivate the memories. I don't want it. And when I do delete dome off there it deleted it off my phone. Please help I am terrified. I don't want to felete my account.

When I activated memories on the Snapchat app it deleted the Snapchat folder on my phone that had all my previous pictures. And they did not move over to memories before they disappeared. Any suggestions for recovery?

Does anyone know how to save memories quickly onto your camera roll? Im trying to make a video from my trip and i have HUNDREDS that im trying to save individually and its very tedious.
Also i lost a lot of footage that didnt even save onto memories! I think its because i didnt have internet, but its so frustrating! Is there anyway to retrieve lost footage?
I dislike this feature very much... I see the benefits, but its done more bad than good for me.

If you want to save the snap that's stuck in Memories:
A bit tedious, but go into memories (swipe up from camera), tap on the snap you want to save (I’ve only been able to do one at a time), tap on the image and tap on ‘edit and send’ at the bottom. Then, tap on the three horizontal lined icon on the top right, and select ‘save to camera roll’. :) Hope this helps!!

I hate this feature. Even worse, I hate That once I accidentally clicked "start memories" I cannot go back.

If I want to save my pictures to my phone, because I take photos on Snapchat that seem to look better than my camera, I have to go through the process of deleting them off memories because I don't want everyone seeing them.

Stupidest idea. There should be a setting where you can decide whether the save or download button sends it to your memories, to your phone, or both. And it should be a remembered setting so I don't have to hold it down to save to both places, just to go back and delete it from my memories. Horrible "upgrade" to snapchat. I want my pictures saved to my phone quick and easy like it used to be. Memories seriously ruined Snapchat for me.

If you want to save the snap that's stuck in Memories:
A bit tedious, but go into memories (swipe up from camera), tap on the snap you want to save (I’ve only been able to do one at a time), tap on the image and tap on ‘edit and send’ at the bottom. Then, tap on the three horizontal lined icon on the top right, and select ‘save to camera roll’. :) Hope this helps!!
+ And if you want to change the settings so that it saves to camera roll instead, go to your main Snapchat page (the one with the huge ghost icon in the middle), click on settings (the gear in the top right corner), scroll down to Memories. Tap on Memories, and tap on 'save to...', select 'camera roll only'. :)

I guess deleting the app, then downloading it again should give you the option of downloading your backed-up memories, though your backed up memories are synced quite often, so if you've deleted your snaps, they're likely deleted from your backup, too.

Your snapchat memories are not public to everyone. No one can access your memories except for you. It's like a camera roll for snapchat. Now, for the camera roll setting, when it says "your camera roll is not backed up by snapchat" it just means that while snapchat saves your other memories (like stories etc) it doesn't save your camera roll on the app. So if you delete a photo from your camera roll then it will delete on the camera roll setting on snapchat too. Get it?

Retarded that they have now moved the rec button in order to squeeze in the memories button. Terrible idea, people are accidentally failing to record golden moments due to that damn button jumping up few millimeters after opening it. Cannot describe how frustratingly retarded this is